Dan O'Malley's Eastern Bank Labs announced that it is deploying voice recognition software from Nuance to authenticate Eastern Bank customers while they have a normal conversation with a call center rep.

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"This was, believe it or not, the single biggest specific complaint we got in customer research," said Dan O'Malley, head of Eastern Labs, the Boston bank's innovation center. "It was really bad. People would call in because they couldn't get into their account and then we would ask them for information about their account. It could really drag on."